If the earth warms up a bit and since a good portion of carbon fuel is used for heating you would think it would be mankind who is helping to moderate natural climate change, in short if it is getting cooler more carbon is used and warmer less.

Once the carbon dioxide is in the air, it stays there for a very, very long time.

It is the quickness of this warming that is the problem with this human caused climate change. All of life has to evolve or die, and it takes time to evolve or adapt. In the past, some climate change events were because the earth's orbit or axis of rotation changed, and this happens over 10's of thousands of years. This time it is in about 250 years, with most of that in the last 30-40 years or so. There is a lag time between us adding carbon dioxide until more and more heat is retained. If we stopped all burning of fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still have several decades of warming, if not centuries.

The last time the atmosphere had as much carbon dioxide as we have now, the ocean level was 20 METERS higher - about 69 feet. Physics doesn't "bend" so that sort of change is coming in maybe the next 1-2 thousand years - hopefully it takes longer, but we don't really know; since this change is so rapid. It might be quicker...

The Hawaii measurements are well known (Keeley is an IPCC "scientist" after all), maybe the others are less so (google Quick View)

Quote:

Modern greenhouse hypothesis is based on the work of G.S. Callendar and C.D. Keeling, following S. Arrhenius, as latterly popularized by the IPCC. Review of available literature raise the question if these authors have systematically discarded a large number of valid technical papers and older atmospheric CO2 determinations because they did not fit their hypothesis? Obviously they use only a few carefully selected values from the older literature, invariably choosing results that are consistent with the hypothesis of an induced rise of CO2 in air caused by the burning of fossil fuel. Evidence for lacking evaluation of methods results from the finding that as accurate selected results show systematic errors in the order of at least 20 ppm [28, 29, 30, 31, 57, 73]. Most authors and sources have summarised the historical CO2 determinations by chemical methods incorrectly and promulgated the unjustifiable view that histoerical methods of analysis were unreliable and produced poor quality
results

Disclaimer - I don't know which is correct but what seems absolutely obvious is that the "simple physics" model doesn't seem to fit any more - or at least not reliably.

Before we decide whether to prevent (for which it is apparently either too late, or we have another 4 years / 100 months, 10 years to "save the world") or adapt or do nothing it would be good to find out more.

As for other species - a lot of what is around now has also been around when it has been a lot warmer and a lot cooler. The biggest threat it faces is us, now.

Of course the sun is an important part of the climate. As is the orbit and angle of the the earth. There has been change in the past and the reasons for those changes are known. Sometimes the orbit changes drive the temperature up, which then causes the ocean to release carbon dioxide, which then increases the temperature more - this is what happened ~125,000 years ago.

That was then. This current climate change is being driven by humans burning fossil fuel, which is raising the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere. Eventually, if the ocean warms enough, more carbon dioxide will be released from the water; which is only one of the major feedback loops.

The sun is currently in a bit of a lull, but overall, it is expected to increase slowly over time. This is part of the reason that we are not seeing a rapid increase in temperature - but the increase in carbon dioxide is tipping the balance toward warming despite the other major factors.

As I mentioned, warming is lagging behind the carbon dioxide - we will continue to see an increase in the temperature, and we will find out how much all the major feedback loops (albedo, methane, melting ice, rising ocean level, carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean) affect things.

So far, all the climate models have been too conservative - warming has increased faster than even the worst case models indicated.